Lunchbox Pizza

Reese has been coming home with a lunchbox full of her lunch for the majority of the year now.  "what do you eat?" I ask her.  Mostly she tells me she shares with friends, but since most of her lunch is still in the box, I don't know what she's sharing with them.

She's slowing stopped eating any sort of protein, too.  She liked Go-gurts, until one splattered on her when she opened it.  She doesn't like peanut butter sandwiches anymore, and won't eat plain peanut butter on a spoon, or peanuts in general.  She used to like ham and cheese roll-ups (we would roll cheddar up in lunch meat) but has changed her mind on those.  She won't eat string cheese anymore.  We put cottage cheese in her lunches and that worked for about two weeks.

So we've been having trouble packing lunches.  The other day she came home and told me that her friend let her try one of her home-lunch pizzas.  She said she put the sauce and the cheese and the pepperoni on it and it came with a piece of chocolate.  This sounds suspiciously like a Lunchable,

And I have not yet caved in to the pre-made lunches.  So far, with the occasional exception, our lunches have been entirely made from scratch- mostly to save on cost, a little because I like to know what's going into my kid's bodies.  But there is room for compromise here!

Pita bread + pepperoni + shredded mozzarella + home made marinara sauce = Reese actually eats lunch again!  Yay!

She likes it so much she asked to have it for dinner.  I was worried about her getting sick of it, but Will and I are going out tonight to eat dinner with someone I am interviewing for a school project, so she picked the right day to ask for this simple dinner.

So we'll call this a win.

Valentines n Stuff

The week before Valentines, Liam got invited to a birthday party for a friend from school.  They went to one of those bow-up toy places. He had a blast.

In the goody bag he got a small car, a stamp, and some stick-on mustaches.  He wasted no time stamping himself on the forehead, and he and Reese utilized the mustaches pretty quickly after he got home.

And then Reese found the stamp and made sure her forehead got stamped, too.

Valentines.  Valentines isn't a huge holiday at our house.  Will got me a box of my favorite candy, Zours.  That's about it.  

Reese did pass out Valentines at her school.  We had a last-minute crisis the on Valentine's eve when we realized we couldn't use any of Reese's personalized Valentine cards that I purchased in a big bunch two years ago, because they say "from Reese" on them, and in Reese's class she's not "Reese", she's "Shareese" because there's another Reese.  If she handed out those, everyone would think that it was from the other girl.  I had Will run to the dollar store and by then they were out of variety.  Reese is pretty girly, but she ended up having to hand out Phineas and Ferb Valentines.

I made up for it by helping her make a girly Valentine box.  Her favorite color is red, so we used red wrapping paper.  Then she glued hearts and decorations on it.

Liam's class didn't do boxes, but he got jealous so we put one together for him, anyway.

At school she got to wear a big conversation heart.  All the kid's hearts said "te quiero" on one side from their Spanish class. (For the record, I did make it to the school and help out with the Valentines festivities- that's the second class party I've helped with even while being in school myself.)

That night we went to visit family for the long weekend, and got taken out to Chick-fil-A by Gramma and Grampa Faber.  Yay!

A week later, Valentines is over, and Reese had her first big childhood scrape-up when she tripped and landed face-first on the driveway.  Knees, hands, face, bloody nose, the whole shebang. She got lots of band-aids.  Also, Liam's school had a theme week on the week of Valentines, and one of the dress-up days was "fake injury day" and we wrapped his head in a bandage.  Reese decided that wrapping her head in a bandage like Liam had would help her feel better.

Looks like it worked.

Will's Birthday

Will got older this year.  

Since it's his last week at Goldman, his co-workers had two reasons to take him out to lunch.  He left work early so he could get home around the same time Shareese got home from school. He opened up presents before we went out to dinner at Chick-fil-A where the kids got to play in the playplace. We brought a cake with us and sang "Happy Birthday" there. I had to go to a lab for school after we came home, but I had gotten ahead on homework so that I wouldn't have to worry about it when I got home, and Will and I could have some quality time together that evening.  He said that it was an enjoyable birthday.   

Reese and Liam really wanted to buy him new Skylanders because they love having Daddy time playing the Skylanders video game.

(The box wrapped in a blanked ended up being a lays chips assortment, for him to take to work with his lunches)

(I couldn't get them to take any serious-faced photos for a while)

"Happy Birthday Daddy"

(See! I was there that day!)

Happy birthday, Old Man!

Rant

Disclaimer: This is a long, politically-motivated post that has nothing to do with my gaggle of a family.

In the past couple of days I've heard/read some things that make my heart sad as a religious person.  As if religion persecution (as opposed to religious persecution, which is committed by the religious person) has suddenly become acute.

As far as I know, many people came to Americas to escape an oppressive state religion, so they could worship how they wanted.  They came here to be free to practice religion the way that they wanted.  It was such a big deal to them that when the U.S. became a country, we wrote it into our constitution that the government couldn't sanction a religion, so that those of different faiths wouldn't live in fear of being suppressed by another religion.  

Now, people of faith are being oppressed again.  This time, the vehement demand to not be religious at all has become the de facto state religion.  Today when people yell, "Separation of Church and State!" at you, they are usually saying that anyone who's beliefs are based in religion should not be able to have their opinion included when making rules or laws.

Goverment, of any kind in any country, is essentially about imposing someone's beliefs on the masses.  One president thinks its best to wear a seat belt, so he makes it a rule that everyone should wear a seat belt or pay the consequences.  One member of parliament thinks that housing should look nice, so it is the law of the land that you can't keep your pigs in the front of your house.  One chief believes that the firstborn is the one that should inherit his father's property, so any subsequent children are not allowed to make any claims. 

Government is all about taking what you think is best, and making everyone else do it. It is true there are systems that, in theory, only make laws that are agreed upon by a majority of citizens, but the U.S. government certainly is not one of those systems in practice.

Here in the U.S., when someone of faith offers what they think is best, they are accused of "forcing their beliefs on others."  If government is exactly about forcing one's beliefs on others, why is it that only the religious are called out for it?  It's okay to have an opinion, unless it's a religious one. We are no longer seeking to separate church from state, we are seeking to separate religion from those who practice it.

One example of this was in the news yesterday. A school in Utah made international news when a girl was asked to cover her shoulders at a school dance because she was in violation of the dress code.  It turns out her dress was not in violation of the dress code, but a chaperone thought it was, and she ended up embarrassed and wore her coat all night.  It's a sad story (and the dress was beautiful) but the audience comments on every forum that ran the story strongly blame religion.  

Many comments went like this: 

"

• • 
    
• 
  

  
  
  
  

  Kevs_Dad •

  
  

  I'm so tired of these self-appointed mralists.  This is nothing more than religious views eing pushed by public employees in a taxpayer funded public school.  Wrong on soooo many levels
• "

• Aside from the fact that other comments were tactless, ignorant, and even offensive, the sentiment was all the same: Don't let the religious people make the rules.  The reciprocal of this is that anyone except the religious people can make the rules.  

It's seventeenth century oppression all over again.

Web Cam

I was clicking around trying to find my computer's DVD software, and my computer camera popped up all of a sudden.  I must have clicked on it and accidentally taken a picture.  Anyway, just thought I'd share.  This is what I look like right after doing online math homework.

After-Christmas Shopping

January is the universal get-organized month.  Sales on furniture and containers and organizing products go along with new year's resolutions to de-clutter.  I'm no exception to this rule.  I like things to have a place.

I decided to visit the new Container Store that opened up in a  mall not too far away, though not the mall that we usually go to.  I told Shareese and Liam that we were going to find some things to make our house more tidy as we entered from the entrance on the exterior of the mall.  It was fun to see all the organizing things they had in addition to containers, and there were even some things that I or the kids tried to think of a way to use so that we could justify buying.  Unfortunately the things we really needed were too expensive there.

As we worked our way to the back of the store, Shareese became excited: "Look, Mama, there are Christmas decorations in the windows at the back of the store!"  

"Yes," I replied, "That's because there's a mall back there."

"Wow!" Liam exclaimed, "There's a mall in the back of the container store!"

"Can we go check it out?" Shareese asked.

I consented, and we explored what we now call the "secret mall at the back of the Container Store" or "Liam's mall" for short (that's another story)

It was a pretty amazing find.

Christmas

New church outfits.  

Liam loves to look dapper in his suits.

Reese picked out a dress for Christmas, and after a few days I asked her if she would ever wear it again after Christmas, since she really doesn't like dresses anymore.  She said no.  So we took it back. 

I began looking for a gold shirt to go with her plaid Christmas skirt.  No one sells sparkly gold shirts for small girls, so I ended up making one.  I sewed a sparkly necklace on to it, which Shareese thought looked very grown-up, and then she added a necklace of her own creation on top of that.

Shareese got to be a wise man for the annual Heath Christmas story reenactment. She was excited because the had brought her own stuffed camel that she got to hold.

Shareese got pink eye the week prior to Christmas break, and shared it with Liam right at the time of the reenactment, So Shareese and Will went while Liam and I stayed home.

Christmas morning presents

Christmas day gingerbread houses. 

This may end up being a new tradition for us.

 Stockings had a lot of glowy things this year.

After time at home, we at dinner at Gramma and Granpa Heath's, and then traveled to Granna and Granpa Faber's to talk to Lauren on Skype and spend the night.

Then Will and I pawned the kids off on Aunt Becky for a night so we could celebrate 10 years of marriage.  And then Peach ate the leftovers from the delicious lunch he took me to when we left her in the car to pick up the kids.  Happy 10 year anniversary!